“He thought he was meeting a ‘kid’ and signing an autograph”: Songwriter and producer Freddy Wexler on his potentially awkward first encounter with Billy Joel and how he ended up working with him on new single Turn The Lights Back On

Billy Joel.

Of all the musical comebacks we’ve seen and heard over the past few years, Billy Joel’s has got to be one of the more unlikely. Sure, he was still touring, but it had long been assumed that he’d holstered his songwriting pen for good.

Not so, it transpires: with Turn The Lights Back On, the star has his first Billboard Hot 100 hit in more than 25 years, and now Freddy Wexler, one of the song’s co-writers and co-producers, has been telling Billboard the unlikely story of how his collaboration with Joel came about.